Making Skyrim’s huge open-world map look tiny isn’t an east feat, but it seems to have been achieved by the latest tech demo to drop on Steam.
Coming from PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions, the team behind the battle royale shooter, PUBG, Preface: Undiscovered World is a free-to-play tech demo to tease people into the company’s next game.
How many times have you played through Skyrim?
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Players can experience Melba, a brand-new technology that will help the developers create an Earth-sized game world for people to play in.
The full project is still in development, but this demo has been released to whet your appetite.
Here, you can enter and explore a procedurally generated world that uses machine learning to create a dynamic planet in real time.
It sounds like a very power-hungry demo as the world will be created by your GPU, so I imagine that if you aren’t running a high-level graphics card your experience may not live up to the hype.
According to the details on the Steam page, this technology will help build a planet measuring 510 million km² (200 million square miles).
The company promises to build on Melba and continue to bring updates to this demo, so players can see how the upcoming game will utilise the technology.
It’s very bare bones at the moment, but there’s some promise in what’s on display.
The team is open to communication from the community to gather tips for future builds, as well as wants and needs.
It’s clear this will be an evolving project and there is no set date for the finished game which will utilise Melba, nor when updates will come down the pipe.
The screenshots are pretty sparse, but this is a very early look.
I can imagine that in a few months time we’ll be getting a better look at a detailed world that will give big RPGs such as Skyrim a run for their money.